Meet Juniper at Interop, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, May 7 – 9

Juniper will be at Interop Las Vegas from May 7 to May 9 at booth 1751. We have a lot going on and hope that you will come by to see our new products and meet our team. We will be featuring 8 demo areas in the booth that will include a look at the new EX9200 programmable core switch and the JunosV Contrail overlay network technology. There will be a presentation theater that will feature 4 presentations on topics including SDN and the virtual data center. We will also have meeting rooms so that you can discuss your network requirements with our executives and technology specialists.

What Does It Take To Be The Juniper Lab Madness Champion?

Lab Madness, a competition for the best lab setup, took off on our social channels a few weeks ago, bringing together fantastic selection network setups that the community could vote on. See this blog for details, Juniper Lab Madness. I checked-in with this year’s Lab Champion, Ezekiel Castro, whose setup, The Playground, took the title win. At twenty years old, Ezekiel is working to pioneer the adoption of Juniper Networks’ equipment in the Philippines. Find out what he has to say about why he participated and why he like to work with Juniper equipment in this interview.

Did you enjoy your championship experience, and what was your motivation to join?
Yes of course, it is a great privilege on my part that my entry was chosen to be the first Champion in your Annual Juniper Lab Madness Competition. I remember when I received an invite from you. I just talked to my boss and he encouraged me to join. However, when I submitted my entry, I guess it was the last day of submission, I submitted   my personal picture with our lab because I did not have more time to take another picture.

Making the Move to Juniper and Junos – Why it is Worth the Effort.

Is it hard to move to Juniper and Junos and is it worth the effort? It’s a question that we hear often. Many people have been trained on one vendors equipment and OS and used it for years. Then the time comes to upgrade those old switches or routers or maybe add to the WLAN or security infrastructure. It’s the opportunity to try something new. Maybe you’ve been thinking of making the move to Juniper, but you've been wondering how hard it is and if it is worth the effort. I’ve gathered comments and observations that I’d like to share

Why take a multi-vendor approach?
There are many reasons to look at a multi-vendor network. There might be some features that you need to support your applications. You might want to select the devices that give what you really want, instead of buying from the incumbent just because they are familiar. One of the biggest advantages can be to keep your network standards based and rely on proprietary protocols. This might save you down the road.

Introducing Juniper's Enterprise Data Center Solution

The data center infrastructure is evolving. Application architectures have become more distributed; compute has gone from dedicated hosts to hypervisors, and storage has become converged and shared.  The challenge facing organizations is that they need to evolve the network to better serve the business. The network must become simpler and flatter, more automated, more open and integrated with the rest of the environment. A simple and flat network delivers the performance, and management and orchestration integration help the businesses to stay agile. Let’s take a look at how we make this happen.

Challenges in the Data Center Today
The two major challenges in today’s virtualized data center networks are connectivity and operations. Organizations are looking to achieve greater business agility to respond and adapt quickly to business needs. For enterprises that view IT as a strategic business asset, this is characterized by:

Automate Network Configuration with Puppet for Junos OS

With the exponential growth in the numbers of servers in Enterprise Data Center and the corresponding complexity and confusion that can follow the need for management automation of server resources is well understood by the IT staff. However for every server there are one or more network connections that need to be configured and managed and until recently this was still a manual process.  Juniper Networks has addressed this challenge with the release of Puppet for Junos OS.

Why Resource Automation is Needed
Driven to reduce costs while providing high levels of computing power, enterprises are adopting cloud-based computing models based on large numbers of low-cost processors and virtual machines. This is fueling an exponential increase in the volume and complexity of server and network management. Meanwhile, understaffed IT organizations are tasked with supporting the business, as the organizations they serve are under pressure to move with agility in a competitive business environment.

Build your Network with the Vertical Campus Implementation Guide

Designing a large campus network can be a daunting task. It is certainly a complex undertaking. It can be especially difficult if you have to configure equipment that you haven’t worked with before. You might find yourself wishing that someone would write a how to guide. At Juniper Network we hear you and that’s why we’ve published another one of our Implementation guides. This one is for the Vertical Campus. It will show you the way to set up Juniper LAN, WLAN, and security devices and help you get up and running in a shorter time, with a tested and proven design.

The Vertical Campus Implementation Guide
The Juniper Networks® Vertical Campus Implementation Guide provides a simple, tested, step-by-step process for rapidly deploying a large campus solution. The design incorporates the most commonly used enterprise network technologies to provide a simple and scalable network architecture that includes LAN, WLAN, and security components. The guide presents a specific configuration of Juniper Networks hardware and software platforms that have been tested and provide a reliable foundation on which to base a customized network for your business.

Inter Data Center Workload Mobility with VMware

Server virtualization has increasing become implemented in the data center because it enables higher utilization of physical servers increasing their value to the organization. By abstracting the server operating system from the server hardware, virtualization allows physical resources to be shared among many virtual machines. The capabilities of cloning, suspending, and migrating live VMs among a cluster of physical hosts enhances resiliency and performance of applications. Advancements in networking technology allow servers within a single cluster to be located across the entire data center, or in another data center some distance away, further enhancing application availability, but making this technology work isn’t simple.

The Case for Live Migration
There are may use cases put forward for live workload migration and they are covered in the document, and were also covered in my previous blog “Making the Case for Long Distance Virtual Machine Mobility.” These use cases include optimizing server resource utilization, optimizing resource consumption at various locations, hybrid cloud where overflow workloads move to another data center, and disaster avoidance were workloads are moved to saftey, as well as a follow the sun model where workloads move according to the time zone of users. Some scenarios for data center migration for live workloads can be accomplished without implementing complicated first-hop-responder and route-optimization techniques. Other scenarios are possible however, they require implementing protocols that share state and fate, thereby increasing the complexity and reducing the reliability of the connected data centers. As a result of these considerations the network is a critical factor.